Tuesday, June 18, 2013

A Mad Ariadne

This season is
Vladimir Jurowski's thirteenth and last season as Music Director at
Glyndebourne. If he is sad to go it is nothing to the our sadness that he is
going. Because he is a great musician and conductor, moreover his principles
are of the purest. His ego is minimal; his ambitions are entirely for the good
of music. If there is one weak spot it is that he has not spoken out against
productions that he must surely know go against the intentions of the
composer.

But that is a
general operatic malaise of our time and as far as I know Solti was the only
one who ever rebelled and said he would not direct a production that
contravened the composer's intentions. On the whole conductors either go with
the producer's ego flow or they give in because they need the money. It was
known, for example, that Haitink disliked certain productions while he was
director at Covent Garden but forbore to make protest.

The buck is in
the court of the direction of the opera house. Nowadays there is no overall
boss who is willing to say yea or nea; it needs a Diaghilev or a Ninette de
Valois director to override if a production looks like being contrary to the
wishes of its creator. Such overall directors with good taste and general
cultural expertise do not exist anymore it seems.

Nowadays it
appears that a director is chosen, for whatever reason, and is given a free
hand. So that by the time of the first rehearsals, the die is cast and it is
too late for anybody to protest.

And so to
Glyndebourne' new production of Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos which I saw May 25,
the third performance. Contrary to what I had heard: music fine, production
bad, I found the staging of the Prologue quite acceptable, dear old Thomas
Allen in superb form as a commanding , irrepressible Music Master, in good
voice, Kate Lindsey a spirited sympathetic Composer although without the vocal
warmth of Jurinac or Soderstrom. But post-interval, what do see?A replica of wartime Glynders, a makeshift
hospital ward and just to date it, attaché cases marked ENSA, blimey,
Zerbinetta's going to play Gracie Fields! And Laura Claycomb is just as vocally
agile as Gracie was but she is the least sexy 'Netta ever seen. In her aria she
is always surrounded by nurses and even straitjacketed at one point, poor girl.
This whole episode became like Mad Scenes from Ariadne. Anybody seeing this as
their first Ariadne should ask for their money back, it's a travesty of the
intentions of librettist Hofmansthal and composer Strauss. One is told that
this is the début production of Katharina Thoma (why should we pay her college
fees?).

Once again,
incidentally, we are paying good money to hear musicians busting their guts out
to give us a superb musical performance whilst on stage the producer is busting
her guts out to go against the intentions of composer and librettist.

The Finnish
dramatic soprano Soile Isokoski gave a beautiful rendering of the deserted
heroine, playing the title-role. The final duet when Bacchus rescues Ariadne is
often an anti-climax but not in this performance mainly because of the
excellent singing and presence of the Russian heroic tenor Sergey Skorokhodov,
kitted out as air pilot. The harlequins were allowed to look like clowns but
the Naiads were playing nursey-nursey. O what a tangled web this German
producer wove!And what an insult to a
great composer and a great opera!

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About Me

Six weeks in a bank was enough for him to decide to live by and with music. Selling records and writing about them for a high-class gramophone shop, working with London Philharmonic, Symphony and Royal Philharmonic, organising concerts for Myra Hess at the National Gallery and for Michael Tippett whose secretary-dogsbody and friend he was, concert manager for Beecham, music critic for The Scotsman, organiser of the Summer School of Music with William Glock at Bryanston and Dartington for 34 years, broadcaster on radio and TV for 40, during which time he interviewed some 500 of the most famous and interesting musicians, Hindemith to Bernstein, Cage to Swann, Stravinsky to Stockhausen.
He has narrated parts in Façade, Peter and the Wolf, Enoch Arden and Babar the Elephant. For his 70th birthday made a CD with friends Leslie Howard, Steve Race, Malcolm Arnold, Donald Swann, Jeffrey Tate and Ian Wallace. His books include an autobiography Amiscellany, an anthology Words about Music and My Life in Music 1945 – 2000, A Photographer at the Aldeburgh Festival (Nigel Luckhurst) and Musicians on Camera (Lelia Goehr).